A Book of Memories

by Peter Nadas

  The following spring grass grew over the scorched spot.

  And now, after what turned out to be a lengthy digression—so long that it's hard to tell what we had digressed from and to what—it's time to return to the point where we left off our recollections; it's to Maja's rumpled bed that I should return, to her open mouth, to her slightly alarmed yet hate-filled, loving eyes, as she simultaneously wanted and didn't want me to tell her what I knew about Kálmán, and there I am, unable to tell her what I want to tell her; desire, will, and intention falter and stumble on the strict dividing line between the sexes; something made itself felt, something with a will stronger than mine, like a law or an erection; at the same time, the mere mention of the woods was enough to make her lose heart, frustrate her designs, interfere with and even cancel some of her plans, and I could do all that without betraying my own smoldering jealousy.

  That afternoon we were going to go through her father's papers, and there was nothing to stop us from getting down to business as soon as I arrived; her mother had gone shopping downtown, Szidónia was out on an early date, yet we had good reason to tarry: we were scared; now I should find my way back to our dark secret, mentioned only in hushed voices, I should tell about it, about how we conducted our searches, sometimes in my house, sometimes in hers, and I should remark, objectively, that it was more dangerous in my place, because Father knew all about my penchant for spying and snooping and kept his desk drawers locked.

  It was one of those tricky locks, locking the middle drawer locked the rest as well, but the tabletop could be lifted with a screwdriver, and then the lock simply snapped open; Maja and I were convinced that our fathers were spies and were working together.

  This, the most dreadful secret of my life, I have never told anybody before.

  There were enough mysterious elements in the behavior of both men to make our daring supposition not altogether implausible, and we were constantly on the alert, searching and collecting evidence.

  The two men had only a nodding acquaintance, or more precisely, we assumed they only pretended not to know each other well; we would have thought it more appropriate, and also more suspicious, if they didn't know each other at all; sometimes their travels—of unknown purpose—coincided, but we were suspicious even when they didn't and one of the men would leave just as the other returned.

  Once I had to deliver a heavy sealed yellow envelope to Maja's father; on another occasion we both witnessed a particularly suspicious scene: Father was coming home, in his official car, and Maja's father, in his car, was on his way into the city; on busy Istenhegyi Road the two cars stopped, the men got out, exchanged what seemed like routine pleasantries, then her father handed something very quickly to mine; when later that evening I asked Father what Maja's father had given him—the question was a kind of cross-examination, of course—he told me to mind my own business, and laughed suspiciously, which I promptly reported by telephone to Maja.

  If we had found a piece of incriminating evidence, like a cryptic note, some foreign money, a strip of microfilm—we knew from Soviet films and novels that there was always some incriminating evidence, and we went from cellar to attic looking for it—if we had found some tangible, incontrovertibly incriminating evidence against them, we swore to each other that we would report them, because if they were spies, traitors, we'd show no mercy, let them perish! and our mutual oath could not be broken because this mutual intrusion into our parents' lives made us fearful, terrified of each other, and so we kept searching feverishly, hoping to pick up a trail, stumble on a clue, get the thing over with; there was crime in the air, that much we knew, we felt it in our bones; and if there was crime there had to be evidence; at the same time, and equally, we feared being proven right, a fear we had to hide from each other because showing concern for our respective fathers might have been construed as a violation of our oath, a betrayal of our principles; so we stalled and dallied, deferring for as long as we could the moment of possible success, of possibly coming upon some proof positive.

  The moment would have been wonderful, and awful; in my fantasies it implicated only Maja's father, and Maja behaved so heroically that only a single tear of anger and frustration glistened in her eye.

  And that afternoon, in our fear, we got so entangled in each other's soul and body that we mercifully forgot all about our original goal, our secret, the solemn vow, and the search itself, although we knew we couldn't completely get away from them: our political alliance had revealed a mysteriously deep, to us incomprehensible, erotic pain and thrill which proved more powerful and more exciting than our unfulfillable spiritual and physical desires.

  But to return, to pick up the thread of the narrative, even if my narrator-self hesitates at this point, and of course also urges itself to carry on, yes, please continue! go on! yet it fears, even today it fears, that the siren voices of charged emotions may lure it toward further digression, explanation, self-justification, self-exposure, an even more scrupulous unearthing of details, just to avoid this one subject! the analytical part of the self would find this justifiable, because without further detours it is even harder to explain why two children would want to denounce their own fathers, why they would suppose their fathers to be agents of an enemy power—what kind of enemy power, anyway, and who was the enemy of whom ?

  It would be overhasty and no less vulgar if I explained that our secret political alliance gave us the hope that by exposing these two men, whom we loved with the most ardent physical love above everyone else, by sending these fathers to the gallows, we could unburden ourselves of this impossible love; and in those years denunciations like these were not considered only the result of childish fantasies: the imagined scenario, like a broken record, kept going around and around in our minds.

  But this was it: what had to happen did happen, and there was to be no more delay; Maja pulled her foot out from under my thigh, helping herself with her hand, slipped out of our closeness, quickly and mercilessly, as when one is compelled to cut something off, got up, and started for the door.

  From the middle of the room she looked back—her face was red, splotchy, and most likely as hot as I felt mine to be; she gave me a strange, soft smile—I knew she was heading for her father's study, but I waited for my emotions to subside; again she was the stronger, which made me feel as if she had torn herself from my body, a feeling that would not subside, because as she was standing there smiling, in the middle of the room filled with flickering green shadows, I heard myself think, in Kálmán's voice, I should have screwed her; it was as if in his stead I had bungled something he had been waiting for in vain.

  And the reason I called her smile strange is that it had neither disdain nor mockery but, if anything, perhaps a touch of sadness, meant more for herself than for me: a wise smile, a mature smile that tried to solve this seemingly insoluble problem not with the superficiality of force but by sensibly accepting the notion that when you are unhappy in a given situation, when you get no satisfaction from it, then you must, without repudiating anything, change it.

  The slightest change in our situation holds out hope; even a restless little stirring can offer hope.

  And this is so even if the new situation, like the one Maja was now offering to me and to herself as she headed for the other room, seemed at least as insoluble, and ethically as disastrous, as the previous one; still, it was a change, and change has an optimism of its own.

  There I sat on her rumpled bed, my heat still feeling hers, all that heat and energy which ultimately had been conducted nowhere stayed in me, in the bed, in her, while the room looked back at us impassively, coolly; I could not break out of that heat to obey her summons now, and not only because my body wasn't presentable but because her smile generated new waves of gratitude and realization in me.

  Today this realization seems more like obtuseness, and I think the reason I felt such great but by no means obligatory gratitude was that she was a girl, and though I didn't feel like poking around in her
father's papers, I knew I was going to follow her.

  It was as if she knew better, knew that our secret search would produce the same aching excitement in our bodies that could not be gratified before.

  Then without a word she left the room.

  I never loved her as much as I did then, and I loved her because she was a girl, which may not be so great a foolishness as it at first sounds.

  When after long minutes my body was finally ready to move, to shift position, and walking through the deserted dining room I entered the study, she was standing by her father's desk with her back toward me, waiting—she couldn't start without me.

  The enormous desk, with many drawers of various sizes and compartments in various positions, unattractively dark and unadorned, took up almost the whole room, looking like an old, overweight animal on short thin legs.

  I shouldn't close the door, she told me quietly but impatiently, her tone almost hostile; it was fairly late, which meant her parents might be coming home soon.

  She needn't have said that; we always left the door ajar, to give us some cover but also so we could hear approaching steps; the study was like a mousetrap, a dead end, the innermost room in the apartment, a kind of pit, as it were, from which there was no escape; you could leave here only by backing out, invariably bumping into an overstuffed chair as you did.

  No matter how much we tried to discipline ourselves, as soon as we sneaked into this room our breathing turned loud, choppy, almost whistling, and we had to hold things too firmly, too deliberately, to hide our trembling movements, but the effort betrayed us anyway, making each of us vulnerable to the other, and that's why we spoke hostilely even when there was no reason for it, and somehow, in here, we each considered every move made by the other to be clumsy, wrong, sure to spoil everything.

  It's hard to say which one of us was in greater danger; in her house, she was, I suppose: any incriminating evidence found in this room would have exposed, first of all, her father; consequently, irritated as I was, I felt I had to be more considerate with her than she might be with me; on the other hand, if we were caught red-handed, I'd be far worse off, because I had even less right to touch things in this room than she did, which is why I positioned myself so that if I heard footsteps I could be the first to slip out; even if it meant abandoning her, I had to have that slight advantage.

  Of course I was a little ashamed of this attitude, but didn't have the courage to give up my advantage; I projected the worst possible scenario: if I heard footsteps only at the last minute, I'd quickly grab and hold the doorknob, like someone just standing there, observing her, not touching anything but the doorknob; I admit, even as an imagined scene this was very cowardly.

  Yet our frantic excitement, the almost intolerable tension, could not be allowed to affect our activity; there was to be no haste but painstaking precision, infinite circumspection, we could not behave like amateur burglars who ransack the whole house looking for money and jewelry and then clear out leaving a huge mess behind; the nature of the work was such that we couldn't expect quick results and there was no detail we could afford to overlook; so in spite of all our excitement and impatience, we learned to exercise self-control, to be humble and meticulous, and we turned ourselves into expert sleuths.

  Regardless of its boring familiarity, we first had to inspect the area under investigation, a procedure with a definite order, if not rules of its own; at their house she directed the work, while at mine it was my job cautiously to pull out the drawers—in each case the host had to assume responsibility for the operation's physical aspects—and together we had to ascertain whether there were any notable changes since the last search; generally two weeks, sometimes a whole month went by before we could reinspect each desk, a long enough period for substantial changes in the contents of some drawers: objects and papers might disappear, temporarily or permanently, the old contents might be differently arranged, or entirely new objects might replace the old ones; in this respect we had a harder time at her house, because her father, while not exactly untidy, was not nearly so neat and methodical as mine, who did not make our job harder by carelessly reaching into a drawer or poking around impatiently in another or pulling out something from the bottom of a pile.

  To start with, Maja quietly pulled out the drawers while I watched over her shoulder, pulled them out one by one, without haste but not slowly either; we were familiar with each other's ability to observe, the pace with which to record what was observed; we knew how much time we each needed to take in the object as well as the direction of our search, to fix in our minds a picture of the drawer's inside, its overall shape that would enable us to make quick comparisons; and it was at such times that, without saying a single word, we had our most professional debates, touching on the very essence of our work; what was at stake was the integrity of our voluntary work as agents, and the heavy political responsibility that went with it: once in a while we might have pushed back a drawer too quickly, without noticing (or, worse, pretending not to notice) possible changes in its contents; at such moments the other person, with a mere glance, ordered a halt and demanded a correction; our roles changed according to the location—in my house she kept an eye on me, here I was the fussy one, though we made sure the control remained impersonal, and wanted to keep it skeptical but not mistrustful, overlooking the regrettable and unavoidable fact that, instinctively, against our better judgment, we were each protecting our respective fathers, which of course could prejudice our work; a drawer whose contents looked suspiciously different or that had been obviously gone through nervously, or the mere sight of a new batch of papers or an odd-looking envelope was enough to make us edgy, and it was the job of the other, acting as controller, to get us over this edginess so characteristic of amateurs, and to do so subtly and delicately, with the sober gravity of a glance reminding us of our commitment to professional honesty and objectivity, helping us overcome our intrusive albeit understandable filial bias; at the same time we couldn't seem sarcastic, aggressive, or rude; in fact, sometimes, for the sake of our ultimate goal, we'd even be slyly complaisant and act as if we hadn't noticed something the other one didn't want or dare to notice, and point it out only later, as if by chance, unexpectedly, and then pounce on the crucial item with all the rectitude of true conviction.

  Only after these preliminaries could the real work begin: the close examination of notes, letters, receipts, papers, and documents; we never sat down but stood next to each other, in the shared sphere of each other's heat and excitement; we read the stuff together and in unison, devouring with greedy curiosity what were for the most part routine and boring, or fragmentary and therefore largely incoherent, pieces of information, and only when it was clear that the other didn't understand or might misunderstand something and therefore draw the wrong conclusion did we break the silence with a few whispered words of explanation.

  We were not aware of what we were doing to each other and to ourselves; in the interest of our stated goal we didn't want to acknowledge that as a result of our activity a feeling was forming, like some tough stain or film, a deposit on the lining of our hearts, stomachs, and intestines; we did not want to acknowledge the feeling of repulsion.

  Because it wasn't just official and work-related documents that we came across but all sorts of other material that we did not mean to find, like our parents' extensive personal romantic correspondence; here, the material discovered in my father's drawers was unfortunately more serious, but once we put our hands on it and went over it thoroughly, painstakingly, with the disinterested sternness of professionals, it seemed that by ferreting out sin in the name of ideal purity, invading the most forbidden territory of the deepest and darkest passions, penetrating the most secret regions, we, too, turned into sinners, for sin is indivisible: when tracking a murderer one must become a murderer to experience most profoundly the circumstances and motives of the murder; and so we were right there with our fathers, where not only should we not have set foot but, according
to the testimony of the letters, they themselves moved about stealthily, like unrepentant sinners.

  There is profound wisdom in the Old Testament's prohibition against casting eyes on the uncovered loins of one's father.

  Maybe if we had uncovered this forbidden knowledge separately, each of us alone, we might have been able to conceal it from ourselves—forgetting can sometimes act like a good comrade; but our situation was exacerbated by our attachment, this passionate and passionately suspicious relationship which went far beyond friendship but had not reached love; we got to know these secrets together and, let's not forget! while still sexually unsatisfied: the very object of these secrets was passion and its mutual gratification, and as we know, a secret shared by two people is no longer a secret; with her full knowledge and approval I read through letters written by a woman named Olga and also by her mother, both women writing from the height of emotional and physical rapture, cursing, berating, extolling, admonishing, fawning, and above all imploring her father not to abandon them, and, in keeping with the conventions of such love letters, decorating their words with encircled teardrops, locks of hair, pressed flowers, and little hearts drawn in red pencil; though old enough to sense the raw power of passion, in our aesthetic squeamishness we found all this very repugnant; with my approval and eager assistance, Maja had a chance to acquaint herself with the stylistically more restrained letters that János Hamar wrote to my mother and the ones my father wrote to Maria Stein, but my father and mother also wrote letters to each other in which they discussed their feelings about being caught up in this inextricably complicated foursome; and since all this was revealed to both of us, we should have made some judgment, or at least have appraised and characterized the information, put it in its proper place; needless to say, this went way beyond our moral strength—which otherwise we thought quite formidable.

  How could we have known then that our relationship reenacted, repeated, and copied, in a playfully exaggerated form—today I know it followed a diabolical pattern—our parents' ideals and also their ruthless practices, and to some extent the publicly proclaimed ideals and ruthless practices of that historical period as well? playing at being investigators was nothing but a crude, childishly distorted, cheap imitation; we could call it aping, but we could also call it an immersion in something real, for Maja's father was chief of military counter-intelligence and my father was a state prosecutor, and therefore by picking up on hints and remarks they dropped, we were both initiated, almost by accident and definitely against their will, into the professional pursuit of criminal investigation; more precisely, for us it was turning their activities into a game that enabled us to experience their present life and work—which we thought was wonderful, dangerous, important, and, what's more, respectable—and also to bring their past closer, which, judging by the contents of those drawers, was filled with adventure, real-life dangers, narrow escapes, false papers, and double identities—we could see their youth; and if I were to go a little further—and why shouldn't I?—I'd have to say that they were the ones who blessed the knife with which we sought their lives; in this sense, we not only suffered for playing our games but also took great delight in them; we loved being serious, we basked in the glory of our assumed political role, not only filled with terror and remorse but bestowing on us a grand sense of power, a feeling that we had power even over them, over these enormously powerful men, and all in the name of an ethical precept that, again in their own views, was considered sacred, nothing less than the ideal, self-abnegating, perfect, immaculate Communist purity of their way of life; and what a cruel quirk of fate it was that through it all they were totally unsuspecting, and how could they have guessed that, while in their puritanical and also very practical zeal they were killing scores of real and imagined enemies, they were nurturing vipers in their bosom? for after all, who disgraced their ideals more outrageously than we? who put their ideals more thoroughly to the test than we, in our innocence? and since we also harbored the same witch-hunter's suspicion toward them and toward each other, which they had planted in us and bred in themselves, with whom could we have shared the dreadful knowledge of our transgressions, whom? I couldn't talk about things like this with Krisztián or Kálmán, nor could Maja discuss them with Hédi or Livia, for how could they have understood? even though we lived in the same world, ruled by the same Zeitgeist, this would have been too alien for them, too bizarre, too repulsive.